Why US presidential poll makes even an Indian emotionally invested in entire rigmarole

Nov 11, 2012, 03.47 AM IST

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"It is precisely this made-for-television election that has allowed me and my counterparts in urban India to become so emotionally invested in the election of the US president."

By Shloka Nath

I watched Jon Stewart devilishly rip apart Republican propaganda every night for two months. I tweeted as Clint Eastwood’s Chair. I applauded loudly when Bill Clinton endorsed Barack Obama. I paid furious attention when my classmates brought up legendary pollster Nate Silver and his predictions for the elections. I even debated pro-life and anti-marijuana laws. And then I realised I don’t have a vote in the US presidential election.

I left India to come study in Boston last year. Studying public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, there has been no escaping the spectacle that is the electoral process in America. I have been, in effect, afforded the luxury of a curious vantage point, of being on the inside, looking out — at the primaries and caucuses, the candidates who tried and failed, the press baying at the first sight of blood, ready to expose even the slightest of private fallibility (a practice wholly taboo in Indian elections), the billions of dollars spent over two years, the conventions, the opinion polls, the parties, the balloons, the sporting metaphors, the wild cheering and finally the day itself. India and the US are two democracies that in essence run the same show but sing to an entirely different tune.

Reality Show

It is precisely this made-for-television election that has allowed me and my counterparts in urban India to become so emotionally invested in the election of the US president. I found myself more concerned about the Obama-Romney face-off (“Obama has definitely won this debate”) than in electing my own parliamentary representative in New Delhi. But why was that the case? And the answer lies somewhere here: as a member of urban India, I am part of a constituency too splintered to be regarded as a significant vote bank. My elections take place instead in the “other” India, the one where an ageing Bollywood star or cricketer is garlanded and paraded through a village, where local politicians fetish themselves before the media.

My electoral processes are often marked by corrupt politicians and skewed policies. My parliamentarians often come across as self-serving busybodies, and the parliamentary elections too regularly have been perverted by elaborate pandering to caste and communal identities. And, of course, there is the failure of governance that is compounded by ceaseless wheeling and dealing beyond the pale of accountability. And so India’s middle class has removed itself from political considerations, and the great democracy dhamaal is a party that many of India’s urban youngsters have chosen, rightly or wrongly, not to attend. By contrast, the American elections are conducted in a dialect I speak. There are rules here. Blood flows inside the ring, it doesn’t seep into the bleachers where it cannot be controlled: things are tidier about American elections, even when they are at their most disgraceful.

The Biggie

There are practical considerations as well. Embittered and ageing economy notwithstanding, the US is still the leader of the free world, and if you want to stay free, you better be paying some serious attention to what’s being said on the election trail. For the most part, official India doesn’t really choose sides in US presidential elections (over the last 15 years, successive leaders in Washington have placed a huge premium on enhancing bilateral relations – it doesn’t really matter whether it’s Romney or Obama for India). What we are concerned with is how America flexes its foreign policy considerations globally and the Asia-Pacific, especially in reference to China and Pakistan.

Obama, wins in this respect — he is no longer viewed as the shining beacon of hope as he was in 2008, but he is seen as a leader who will not create too many foreign policy headaches as opposed to Romney’s worryingly oscillatory stance on Iran — from uncertain to hawkish, to both. Traders on India’s Dalal Street also seem satisfied with the Obama victory, as they expected Romney’s budget cuts to precipitate a liquidity crunch that would have starved Indian markets of inflows from US institutional investors.

Drumbeats of Democracy

So, we can all breathe a sigh of relief. The US presidential elections are over and the world can sleep a little more peacefully at night.

But my elections are not here. They are elsewhere, back home in India. And it is easy sometimes to view the downward trajectories of India’s democratic history, and point to prognostic announcements of its malaise, as we do today. There is widespread anger and dismay at our corrosive and corrupt government, our civic apathy and fatigue.

In 1967, British journalist Neville Maxwell wrote a series of articles, calling out India’s “disintegrating democracy”, and predicted that the general elections that year would be India’s last. He wrote, “The great experiment of developing India within a democratic framework has failed.” Maxwell could not have been more wrong. India moves to the drumbeats of democracy, raucous as they are.

(The writer is a student at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard)